CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND AND THE ORIGIN OF SKYE BANK PLC
Banking in Nigeria took a new dimension after the pronouncement of the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria professor Charles Soludo for the need to improve the banking industry in Nigeria thereby competing with other foreign banks, hence capital base to 25 billion naira.
According to the governor of central bank professor Charles Soludo, the whole idea of the increment is to give room for other small financial institutions to strive, thereby reducing the rate of competition amongst banks in Nigeria.
For the purpose of this study, Skye Bank PLC came together as an entity after due diligence was carried out amongst their five banks.
• Prudent Bank
• EIB Eko International Bank
• Reliance Bank
• Bond Bank
• Cooperative Bank Ltd
Currently, the bank has a significant network spread across the nation over 200 branches and also planning to spread across West African countries, turn up before the end of 2007, it major of business is centered round services, hence service delivery is term of Skye Bank or the hallmark as it term.
As a new generation bank, Skye Bank Plc is online real that is to say every customer can access his/her account from any of location whether it is savings or current account. It is worthy to know that the bank is highly aggressive in expanding its numerous clientele world, that is to say that the satisfaction derived by the customers is a key.
As a strategy to preposition the industry in order to offer high quality products, CBN embarked upon a process of scrutinizing products offered by banks.
Quality management of products in a post consolidation era been brought to front banner. In order to contribute to this debate, TQM (total quality management) as a policy for assessing and
regulating service delivery process became a very important instrument in this regard.
At the heart of the survival of any bank the satisfaction of the clients is most important, the clients/customers are only satisfied when their demands are being met at the right cost and to the right quality. Ironically, it only when the customers are satisfied that the bank in question can be seen as performing it as a new generation bank.
One particular approach to improve organizational performance and effectiveness is the concept of the Japanese-inspired Total Quality Management. This is a set of management practices throughout the organization, geared to ensure the organization consistently meets or exceeds customer requirements. TQM places strong focus on process measurement.
The successful organization should as a matter of policy be constantly seeking opportunities to improve the quality of its products or services and processes; the bank must also couple quality with a required level of productivity. TQM represents a total system and as such increasingly enhances quality circles as a broader means of addressing the demand for quality.
Total Quality Management is a method by which management and employees can become involved in the continuous improvements of their products and services. It is a combination of quality and management tools aimed at increasing profit and reducing losses due to wasteful practice.
This research work stems from the need to evaluate the cost of quality vis-à-vis its benefits in terms of increased productivity of any organization, a lot of banks pay lip service to quality simply because they do not realize the benefit such investment of time, effort and money will bring to their banking system other are skeptical on whether or not there is any real benefit at all.
It was the need to clear all these and show through a detail and systematic study of how a popular quality philosophy such as TQM will affect the performance of Skye Bank PLC that forms that background for the study.